Transcript to Eide’s Human Rights View of Hunger
Suarez: Just a few moments ago we heard the United States Secretary of Agriculture
laying out a highly economically driven view of world food security, and individual food
security. I understand you have posited a human rights view. Is it very different when we
look at the menu of things that we have to do as a world.Is it different from the
Secretary’s view?
Eide: Well, yes and no. I think “no” because I think no one denied that this has a lot to do
with economics as well. But I think that we must at some stage come beyond the
perception that there are two absolutely polarized views. Either you are thinking in
economic terms, and you believe in the market, in the trickling down of the markets, and
so on, or you believe in development from below, human rights, those sort of “good
things”. I think we have to try to begin to look at these two things together, and to see
how both are needed. But of course, as you are hinting at, I believe, and there are many
with me who believe so, that perhaps an approach which we talk about as the “Human
rights-based” approach, is one that can become a check on the other processes. What we
think of today as the globalization process that we are usually talking about in the
negative, but I think that without defending all that there is in the globalization process, I
think that we have to look at what is good at this and harness this for the benefit of the
good. But before we begin to talk about the human rights approach, I think one has to
understand or begin to talk about the institutional basis, the political institutional basis,
for either of these processes. It is not just to say human rights, it is not just to say
democracy, but to understand what these concepts really consist of.